What Men Think About

“By means of a golf tally counter, 283 college students kept track of their thoughts pertaining to food, sleep, or sex for one week. Males reported significantly more need-based cognitions overall, but there was no significant interaction between sex of participant and type of cognition recorded. Therefore, although these young men did think more about sex than did young women, they also thought more about food and sleep.”

— “Sex on the brain?: an examination of frequency of sexual cognitions as a function of gender, erotophilia, and social desirability,” Fisher, Moore, Pittenger,  Journal of Sex Research 2012, via NCBI

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Does Repetition Make It Music?

“In fact, repetition is so powerfully linked with musicality that its application can dramatically transform apparently non-musical materials into song,” writes Elizabeth Margulis.  Yusef Lateef (above) agrees.

More:

“One more time,” Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Aeon

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Thoughts of Women Stupify Male Brains

“Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men’s cognitive performance,” according to a research team from Radboud University in the Netherlands. “Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness.”

When heterosexual males interact with attractive women, they put so much effort into trying to make a good impression that they don’t have the resources left to think clearly. Caveat: by “males” the scientists mean their usual research animals, university students.

More:

“Sex on the Brain Proves Costly for Men,” Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune

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Image (“American Male Mind”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Trains and Brains

The classic London Underground Map, created by Harry Beck in 1933, is the granddaddy of all those schematic maps that chart subway systems in a simplified manner, without regard to the true scale of distances between stations. These maps reduce complex systems to comprehensible basics, but a recent NYU study shows that users actually regard the maps as if they were drawn to scale, and act accordingly: